A search engine for Maths. You can type things like “y = (x+1)(x-1)x” or “weather Birmingham UK 2008” and get graphs and data. You can type a search term like “x^3 – 2x = 10” and the system will solve the equation exactly or approximately and draw graphs.

I’ve changed over to the Bodmas minimal theme, based on ‘Zero’ while I test out an HTC TyTN phone on loan from the College. I’m trying to push the idea of a mobile phone as an e-learning material acquisition platform. More soon.

“The crux of the problem lies in the assumption that any program executing on a system on the user’s behalf should have the exact same abilities and permissions as any other program executing on behalf of the same user.”OLPC wiki entry for bitfrost

Nice page on the security model built into sugar, the operating system [...]

Download a metric units quiz. One side of A4 with a question where students match a measurement of an object (weight of new born baby, height of typical door) with the corresponding value (3Kg, 2 metres). Then the students have to find objects in the room that are various sizes. Finally some questions involving simple [...]

“He and his unit had saved their sweet rations and were holding a Christmas party for local Berlin children. As he lifted a young boy on to a chair, he saw the child had only one arm. With a sickening flash he realised that only three years earlier the Allies had bombed the very people [...]

A University teacher called Cath Ellis posted her 10 Commandments of e-learning on a blog. Clive Shepherd (a free lance e-learning specialist working for companies) picked up on that post and put forward his 10 principles. Cath is working from a model of e-learning that is discussion based, Clive (deliberately) took a contrasting view based [...]

Vanilla is a simple and rather basic forum script that runs on a Web server and needs a MySQL database and PHP (MySQL 3.23+ and PHP 4.1+). I had an instance working in about 5 minutes. The very basic functionality can be extended using plug-ins. In particular the rather ace autolinks plug in will automatically [...]

Linux allows you to use old hardware with a current, relatively secure operating system and the usual applications. I’ve put Ubuntu 9.04 on the Linux partition of my old Dell laptop mainly because of the Network Manager that has appeared in Ubuntu since 8.10. Networking Just Works with a range of WiFi cards and, [...]